AI (artificial intelligence / machine learning) research grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation NSF, organized with recipient, amount, and sources. Primary information on where the U.S. invests public funds in AI research. This site is not an official U.S. government website.
This page is a general organization of public information. Amounts are the obligated amount as of the check date and may change with additional obligations or revisions. For privacy, we do not handle principal investigator names.
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Notable, large AI research grants explained with key points, FAQs, and sources.
University of California-San Diego
The NSF awarded about $11M to the "National Data Platform (NDP)," which connects distributed data repositories and computing facilities across the U.S. to lower the barriers to AI-driven research, education, and workforce development. It is a core project of NAIRR (the National AI Research Resource).
Read moreUniversity of California-San Diego
NSF awarded about $10 million to the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego to deploy "Expanse 2," a next-generation supercomputer. With the latest processors and accelerators and a high-speed Ethernet network, it is offered as a national resource that brings data-intensive computing to a broad base of researchers — the "long tail" of science and AI.
Read moreCarnegie Mellon University
The NSF awarded about $10M to "Bridges-3," a national computing platform integrating AI, data analytics, and high-performance computing (HPC). With GPU-accelerated computing and large memory, it serves the U.S. research community broadly.
Read moreUniversity of Puerto Rico Mayaguez
An NSF EPSCoR E-CORE award of ~$9 million obligated (estimated total $10M) led by the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez. Eight UPR campuses and the Ana G. Mendez system join as emerging research institutions to build an island-wide research infrastructure for AI-based sustainable STEM technologies. Pillars: energy-resilient AI systems and quantum sensing and secure communication, with 23 seed awards and computing access lifting smaller institutions. Runs July 2026 to June 2030.
Read moreUniversity of Tennessee Knoxville
The NSF awarded about $9M to turn the National Science Data Fabric (NSDF) — connecting scientists to scientific data wherever it resides (telescopes, accelerators, weather, medical imaging) — from a pilot into an operational national cyberinfrastructure service, so even resource-limited universities can join large-scale, data-driven research.
Read moreMorgridge Institute for Research, Inc.
The NSF awarded about $9M to "FabAID (Fabric for AI-Driven Science)," a national-scale data fabric that supports the lifecycle of scientific datasets. It weaves together data repositories, producers/curators, and processing capacity to give researchers the data-centric workflows that underpin AI-driven research, integrating with NSF cyberinfrastructure and NAIRR.
Read moreUniversity of California-Irvine
The NSF awarded about $9M to the "BRIDGE National Center," which broadens access to data science and AI for scientists across fields like criminology, public health, and neurobiology. Built on the open-source workflow system Texera, it lowers programming and computing barriers so researchers can share and reuse reproducible data/AI pipelines.
Read moreUniversity of Texas at Austin
The NSF awarded about $6.5M to the "Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML)," which develops the foundational mathematical theory and algorithms behind generative AI — including efficient training of large models and accurate, robust, interpretable inference.
Read moreCornell University
The NSF awarded about $6M to the "AI Materials Institute (AI-MI)," which advances foundational AI research while accelerating the discovery of next-generation materials essential for sustainable energy, electronics, the environment, and quantum technologies. A science-ready large language model coupled with multimodal data aims to cut discovery cycles from months to days.
Read moreMassachusetts Institute of Technology
The NSF awarded about $4.98M to renew IAIFI, an institute that fuses AI with fundamental physics. By building AI methods that incorporate first principles from physics, it aims to advance both physics discovery and foundational AI.
Read moreUniversity of Arizona
The NSF awarded about $4.6M to "MESA," a shared platform that automatically describes, organizes, and connects scientific data across fields so researchers can find and use data in minutes-to-hours instead of weeks-to-months. Metadata-enabled AI agents read each new dataset and suggest cross-disciplinary combinations.
Read moreCOMPUTER SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION, LLC.
Most K-12 teachers lack preparation to understand how AI works or how to teach it. The NSF awarded about $3.78M to extend a proven multi-state teacher PD model into AI, equipping thousands of teachers to bring "creating with AI, not just consuming it" to hundreds of thousands of students.
Read moreOld Dominion University Research Foundation
The NSF awarded about $2.5M to a program that gives scholarships to students in AI and cybersecurity (CyberAI) in exchange for government service after graduation. Old Dominion University (ODU) was the first in the nation to have its CyberAI programs validated by the National Security Agency (NSA).
Read moreUniversity of Washington
An NSF award of ~$2.21 million to the University of Washington (with a sister award at University of Alaska Fairbanks). The measurements that could warn of earthquakes, landslides, and floods — ground motion, deformation, satellite imagery, weather, groundwater — sit in separate systems. GAIA builds open tools fusing these streams with simulations into a continuously updating digital twin estimating hazards in near real time, tested on landslides in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Runs 2026-2032.
Read moreUniversity of Southern California
A ~$2.06 million ($2,057,137) NSF grant to the University of Southern California. Subjects hold weekly conversations for a full year while their brain activity is recorded with fMRI; large language models are then mapped onto that activity to reveal how the brain drives a conversation forward. The resulting dataset will be shared widely as a community benchmark.
Read moreBrown University
The NSF awarded about $4M to ARIA, which researches next-generation "AI assistants" starting from mental and behavioral health — a field where trust, empathy, and personalization are critical. It treats human and machine cognition as complementary, organized around three pillars: Grounding, Instructability, and Alignment.
Read moreNorth Dakota State University Fargo
The NSF awarded about $3.85M (a Major Research Instrumentation grant) to acquire "Bison," a GPU-accelerated supercomputer for compute-intensive and AI research. Centered at NDSU, it is a statewide shared resource open to all 11 North Dakota University System institutions and 5 tribal colleges, contributing to democratizing AI.
Read moreUniversity of Alabama Tuscaloosa
The NSF awarded about $2.59M to build research infrastructure and workforce for "Edge AI" — analyzing data directly on cameras, phones, and wearables. It develops lightweight AI algorithms, ultra-low-power AI chips, and nanosensors, with a demonstration of a wearable that predicts diabetes onset from a patient's breath. Six universities (two minority-serving) and industry partners collaborate.
Read moreUniversity of Chicago
The NSF awarded about $2.54M to "Cloud Conversations," an AI conversational assistant that lets researchers describe what they need in everyday language and then builds and verifies the environment on shared research cloud infrastructure. It lowers the specialized burden (system administration, networking, security) of cloud setup and improves research productivity and reproducibility.
Read moreIllinois Institute of Technology
The NSF awarded about $2M to support the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students (S-STEM, Track 2). It gives 22 scholars (in AI, applied mathematics, CS, cybersecurity, data science, operations research, and statistics) scholarships averaging $15,000 (up to five years), with mentoring, interdisciplinary experiential learning, and cohort building.
Read moreUniversity of Florida
The NSF awarded about $2M to "AISuper," which accelerates the discovery of new superconducting materials by combining AI, quantum theory, and experimental synthesis. Graph neural networks predict superconducting properties; generative AI designs synthesizable new materials; and density functional theory (DFT) plus experiments validate them in a closed discovery loop.
Read moreUniversity of California-San Diego
An NSF award of $1.8 million to UC San Diego. Today AI needs massive data, struggles to keep learning without forgetting, and relies on rules far from the brain. This project discovers the biological rules for when and where the living brain updates neural connections. An all-optical approach measures and induces plasticity in awake mice at single-cell resolution, translating selective-rewiring principles into continual-learning AI. Runs 2026-2031.
Read moreMichigan State University
An NSF award of ~$1.69 million to Michigan State University. Where a gene begins to be read — the transcription start site (TSS) — is a switch for when a gene turns on and which protein version it produces, yet no complete map exists across plant diversity. The project builds BioLearnTSS, a machine-learning framework predicting TSS location and core-promoter structure from DNA sequence, validated from algae to crops, with a maize focus on how TSS choice alters splicing and translation. Runs 2026-2029.
Read moreFlorida State University
A ~$1.51 million ($1,509,240) NSF grant to Florida State University. Six existing research datasets covering 90,000 elementary students and 3,000 teachers are integrated into a shared, AI-ready dataset focused on early mathematics — numerosity and operations such as addition and subtraction. Phase I of the IDEAL-Math plan, run by learning scientists, data scientists, AI researchers, and education practitioners together.
Read moreUniversity of California-San Diego
An NSF POSE Phase II award of ~$1.49 million to UC San Diego. Games combine clear rules, measurable outcomes, and real-time challenges — instruments for revealing whether AI can reason, plan, perceive, and decide. Yet game-based AI evaluations have been ad hoc and fragmented, with scattered benchmarks and volunteer-maintained testbeds. LMGame unifies diverse game environments in a shared open-source ecosystem with standardized metrics and reproducible results. Runs July 2026 to June 2028.
Read moreUniversity of New Mexico
The NSF awarded about $1.4M (Major Research Instrumentation) to acquire and operate a large-memory GPU parallel supercomputing cluster for AI- and quantum-driven chemistry and materials research at the University of New Mexico (UNM). It supports computational design of new materials/molecules/reactions and new quantum-computing algorithms for many-body systems.
Read moreNEURALTRAK, INC
The NSF awarded about $1.25M (SBIR Phase II) to technology that brings advanced 3D X-ray imaging into surgery without buying expensive CT scanners. AI models incorporating X-ray physics reconstruct CT-comparable 3D images at low dose from the limited-angle data of standard mobile X-ray systems, helping procedures such as spine surgery be done safely in outpatient centers.
Read moreUniversity of California-Irvine
An NSF IUSE award of ~$1.08 million to UC Irvine, building undergraduates AI literacy through experiential learning. At its center is a three-week unit making matrix factorization, the mathematical foundation of machine learning, tangible through a shaft loom, letting students explore abstraction, pattern decomposition, compression, generalization, and overfitting. An AI conversational agent adjusts scaffolding for varied math, programming, arts, and design backgrounds. Runs 2026-2030.
Read moreUniversity of Virginia Main Campus
The NSF awarded about $1M to address the shortage of AI literacy in high schools by combining teacher training, hands-on student learning, and paid internships into a "classroom-to-workforce pipeline." It aligns with Executive Order 14277, "Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth," and makes all materials freely available.
Read moreUniversity of Texas at San Antonio
The NSF awarded about $2M to foundational research that grows "brain organoids" (3D neural tissue in vitro) from human-derived neurons and uses them for low-power computing, learning, and memory. Against the high power use and limited flexibility of silicon AI chips, it aims to replicate the brain's energy-efficient, flexible information processing in biology — with ethics embedded throughout.
Read moreBaylor University
The NSF awarded about $2M to support the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students in CS and engineering (S-STEM, Track 2). It gives 24 scholars scholarships averaging $12,500 (up to five years) plus mentoring, AI-skill development, and undergraduate research, and uses a predictive-analytics platform, "Navigate," to track progress and enable early intervention.
Read moreUniversity of Oklahoma Norman Campus
The NSF awarded about $1.8M to build a pipeline of professional and student "AI consultants" who help researchers who want to use AI but are not yet doing so. It starts by supporting 91 research teams across 9 Oklahoma institutions and aims to reach researchers nationwide, with an AI-consultant workforce training program as a key output.
Read moreUniversity of California-Davis
The NSF awarded about $1.72M to prepare high-quality STEM teachers who can effectively leverage AI to advance student learning (Noyce scholarship, Track 2). It supports 12 STEM professionals to become grade 7–12 teachers, integrating AI's benefits — personalized learning, timely feedback, and identifying student needs — through both practice and research.
Read moreIndiana University
The NSF awarded about $1.5M to "Safe-OSE," which uses AI to detect and reduce vulnerabilities in the open-source platforms underpinning research clouds (Jetstream Cloud and Exosphere). Using reinforcement learning and large language models (LLMs), it offers context-aware fixes considering the user, time frame, and asset type, and generates vulnerability-minimizing software.
Read moreUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The NSF awarded about $1.5M to discover safe, thermally stable solid ion-conducting materials — helical "peptide electrolytes" — via an AI-guided approach. Using precisely sequenced peptides (biological macromolecules), the project studies how helical structure enhances ion conduction, targeting next-generation energy storage beyond lithium-ion safety concerns.
Read moreUniversity of Hawaii
The NSF awarded about $1.5M to co-design, with residents, low-cost 3D-printed sensors and a portable edge-AI analysis platform to locally monitor sudden changes (e.g., water quality, air particulates) after disasters. It lets remote, rural communities collect and analyze their own local data for rapid response and disaster planning.
Read moreGeorge Mason University
NSF awarded about $1.25 million for research on "Explainable AI" to support evacuation and public-shelter operations during floods and hurricanes — deciding which shelters to open and when, allocating resources, and estimating demand, while accounting for shifting public movement and the failure risks of interdependent infrastructure (transport, power), with reasons shown.
Read moreUniversity of Southern California
The NSF awarded about $1.25M to develop AI tools that analyze officers' body-worn camera footage to study officer–driver communication and refine best practices for traffic-stop outcomes. Academic researchers, the Los Angeles Police Department, and a dozen-plus community organizations collaborate in a community-engaged design aimed at transparency, accountability, and learning.
Read moreUniversity of Alabama Tuscaloosa
AI infrastructure (data centers) needs large amounts of water for cooling. The NSF awarded about $1.21M to develop three AI models that assess water availability and predict risks to guide siting — using physics-informed AI and digital twins to analyze water sustainability.
Read moreBoard of Regents, NSHE, obo University of Nevada, Reno
The NSF awarded about $1.2M to research "CAML" — machine-learning methods that let AIoT (AI + IoT) devices decide quickly and accurately under limited communication and compute, meeting safety, accuracy, and latency needs. It lets heterogeneous edge devices (varying bandwidth, compute, data) work together for smart health, connected cars, AR, and smart cities.
Read morePlanetary Science Institute
The NSF awarded about $1.18M for an education project that teaches high schoolers AI concepts using planetary-exploration images and generative AI. Using creative work (generative art and digital stories) as an entry point, it invites youth who might not otherwise explore STEM. It reaches about 360 high schoolers directly and showcases their work at museums; funded by the AISL/ITEST programs.
Read moreUniversity of California-Berkeley
The NSF awarded about $1.13M to research a photonic-electronic hybrid processor that performs AI matrix operations with light, aiming to cut energy use by up to two orders of magnitude versus CMOS. Using wafer-scale heterogeneous integration of thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) and silicon, it would support real-time decisions for LLMs and multi-agent systems at low energy.
Read moreUniversity of Tennessee Knoxville
NSF awarded about $1.04 million for an AI-enabled soft robot that mimics the eye's protective functions (blinking, tear flow, corneal sensing) to autonomously keep a laparoscopic camera's view clear during minimally invasive surgery. It integrates soft actuation, programmable fluidics, and real-time AI control, with applications also in space, disaster response, and industry.
Read moreNorth Carolina State University
The NSF awarded about $1M for an experiential program, "ExLAIM," that helps K-12 in-service teachers adopt generative AI safely and effectively. In-service teachers, undergraduate computing majors, and industry mentors co-design AI-integrated lessons using a retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG) chatbot, "MerryQuery," with safety and reliability checks built in.
Read moreUniversity of Pennsylvania
The NSF awarded about $1M to research on the mathematical foundations of "alignment" in generative AI — tackling risks like bias, unsafe, and misleading outputs in large language and diffusion models, and adapting public models to fairness, safety, reliability, and truthfulness.
Read moreAI-related (artificial intelligence / machine learning) research grants, largest obligated amount first. Each grant links to the official NSF page.
Source: NSF Award Search (U.S. National Science Foundation, public domain). Amounts are the obligated amount. For privacy, we do not handle principal investigator names.
